The origins
Buenos Aires → Torrevieja. The prologue, undocumented.
Buenos Aires, 1986. At five, the first move: from Buenos Aires to Chile. It went wrong and they went back to Argentina. At six, a second move: he and his parents settle in Benidorm (Alicante). The plan goes wrong again and they return to Buenos Aires, poorer, in less than a year. At ten, his parents sell the car and everything they own and manage to put together three plane tickets and 1000 dollars in their pocket. That is how they return to Spain — this time to Torrevieja, to try their luck. Before turning twelve he has been through more than ten schools. Nothing from the Argentine decade survives in the archive; nothing from the first years in Spain either. This is the stratum with the fewest documents on the whole site, and we say it plainly: there is no founding myth here, just a few facts and one key year.
The key year is 1998. He is twelve, and in that same year the two tools that order everything that comes after arrive: a spray can and a computer. He paints his first piece and from then on never goes more than a week without painting. On the computer he starts with MS Paint; then Photoshop arrives and changes everything. One of the first things he does: scan the photos of his own graffiti and correct their color. The wall and the screen were not successive stages. They arrived at the same time, and they never separated.
Graffiti was not a revelation: it was the landscape. In the neighborhood, kids spent their afternoons in the street — skating, playing football, painting — and he always liked to draw. When the archive starts in 1999, with the earliest dated photos that survive, he is already signing PANT, and from there the practice is continuous. Everything before that rests on his word, not on papers. The strata that follow overflow with documents; this one is short because before 1999 there are, simply, no images to show.
«A los doce años pinté mi primera pieza, y desde entonces nunca he estado más de una semana sin pintar.»
Felipe Pantone, OCIMAG 2016
- 1986Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina.Wikipedia · Albertz Benda · monografía FPSTUDIO
- c. 1991First move, at age five: Buenos Aires → Chile. It goes wrong and the family returns to Argentina.relato de Felipe Pantone
- c. 1992Second move, at age six: to Benidorm (Alicante). It goes wrong again and they return to Buenos Aires, poorer, in less than a year.relato de Felipe Pantone
- c. 1996At ten, his parents sell everything — the car and all their possessions — put together three plane tickets and 1000 dollars, and try their luck in Spain, this time in Torrevieja (Alicante). He tells it like this: «a los diez años mis padres y yo nos fuimos a vivir a Torrevieja».OCIMAG 2016 · relato de Felipe Pantone
- 1986–1998Changes school more than ten times before turning twelve.Juxtapoz, verano 2020
- 1998First computer, at age twelve. He starts with MS Paint; then, Photoshop. Among the first things he does: scan photos of his own graffiti and correct their color.Praesentia, entrevista con Roger Gastman (2018)
- 1998First spray-painted piece, at age twelve, in Torrevieja — the same year as the computer. Active in graffiti ever since, with no breaks longer than a week.OCIMAG 2016 · Handstyler 2015
- c. 1998First tag: «Cadillac». Then PANT — the start of the documented chain Cadillac → Snef → Pant → Pant1 → Pantone.Juxtapoz, verano 2020
- 1999Earliest dated photographs that survive: a blue «PANT» piece and a group photo of some eight teenagers in the Torrevieja area. The visual archive starts here; from before, there are no images.Beyond The Streets (libro de grafiti)
